Quick Ubuntu Accomplishments Update

Apr 4, 2012

It has been a few weeks since I last posted an update about the Ubuntu Accomplishments project. As such I wanted to take a few moments to update you lovely people with some of the progress being made in the project and show off some juicy screenshots too.

Let’s take a look at the eye-candy first and then I will get to the big changes. Firstly, I created a nicer looking icon for the GUI and a desktop file ready for when we package:

Next, Rafal Cieslak is a new contributor who has been doing some fantastic work. Rafal added support so that you can start the GUI without having to run the daemon first:

Rafal also added support so that you can click on accomplished trophies and some information is displayed about them:

Next up, inspired by the awesome Hello Unity by our very own Michael Hall, I added Launcher support for the GUI. Now when a new trophy is awarded to you the Launcher icon shakes to get your attention and displays the number of freshly awarded trophies to you:

Our final screenshot is thanks to the great work of Alessandro Losavio and the wonderful Italian Ubuntu community. Alessandro has created a collection of Italian accomplishments, complete with Italian documentation and custom icons. You can see this below:

Thanks also to Simon Watson for making the My Trophies and Opportunities buttons depress; this makes it much easier to know which view you are looking at.

There has also been a number of large structural changes going on as the project is maturing. Firstly, the backend service is now a full twistd application. This means it runs as a full daemon, starts and shuts down properly, and is properly logging events. This piece was an important part of getting the back-end service ready so we can deploy it on systems for testing. Thanks to Duncan McGreggor for his wonderful work in helping to make this happen.

Another important milestone, and one that I completed tonight, was adding support for multiple languages in accomplishment sets. The Ubuntu Accomplishments system can support accomplishments from any online or offline community or project and I wanted to ensure that the documentation that explains how an accomplishment can be completed is available in your own language. This is important not only to support different languages but to also be able to provide language and country specific resources (e.g. websites and IRC support channels). This is now in there and working pretty well. I will posting more in a few days to encourage our translations community to get involved and translate the accomplishments sets.

Following on from multiple language support inside the system itself, there has been a lot of activity going in the Ubuntu Accomplishments Web Editor project. The Web Editor project is designed to make it easy for our community to contribute documentation for available accomplishments, and part of this goal is to also enable translations via the web editor. This will feed into the multiple language support that I added tonight. Thanks to Janos Gyerik for driving this discussion forward and Bruno Girin for bringing his expertise to the fold too. We definitely need Django developers to help with this project, so if you are interested, please join the mailing list and help. 🙂

Finally, I want to offer my thanks to Matt Fischer for stepping up to help with packaging Ubuntu Accomplishments. He has already created a Daily PPA for the Ubuntu Community Accomplishments set, and Matt is now working to get the core system packaged too so that you folks can play with it, test it, participate, and file bugs.

Interested in joining the team and helping? We need all kinds of help…documentation writers, programmers, translators, web developers, and testers! To get involved join the mailing list and introduce yourself, join #ubuntu-accomplishments on Freenode IRC, and be sure to see the Wiki Homepage. Thanks!.

JOIN AS A MEMBER

Joining as a member is FREE. Get updates directly to your inbox, access to member-exclusive content, early access to new projects and material, win prizes, free 1-on-1 workshops, and more.

3 Comments

sil
on April 4, 2012 at 7:46 am

Call me Mr Thick, but… why would you ever want to answer “no” to the “start the daemon?” question? (Ignore for the moment that it shouldn’t say things like “daemon” in a user-facing app, although it shouldn’t :)) The app doesn’t work if the daemon’s not running. Shouldn’t the app start the daemon unconditionally? Or, better… work out why the daemon isn’t running, since if it isn’t you aren’t getting your accomplishments checked…?